“From my close observation of writers…they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.”

-Isaac Asimov

“A bad review is like baking a cake with all the best ingredients and having someone sit on it.”

- Danielle Steel

I won’t lie. BAD. REVIEWS. SUCK. Unfortunately, there’s no avoiding it. If you’re a writer, you WILL get a bad review at some point in your career. It’s a law of the universe right alongside gravity.

Noooooooo!

But wait! The good news is…it’s a law of the universe right alongside gravity. It isn’t personal. Getting a bad review does not mean that you’ve been singled out by a highly-trained, black ops book blogger hit squad. It simply means that…well…you’ve gotten a bad review. Congratulations. You are a certified human being! You can’t please everyone. Need proof? Take the quiz!

Through *ahem* extensive research I was able to determine the FIVE BEST BOOKS ever written (Googling “Greatest-books-of-all-time” counts as research, yes? You can find the complete list compiled by TIME ENTERTAINMENT here.) See if you can match the novels above with the random 1 star Amazon customer reviews I found below. (Note: I edited out parts of the reviews due to length considerations. Everything – including the headings – are direct quotes.)

A) “THE BIG SNOOZER”

“Whomever claims this to be a great book needs their head examine or probably has been subjected to a lobotomy. This 900 page of rubbish is no more than a glorified, pompous, shallow soap opera nicely ensconced in a setting I would terrorize and throw rocks at with much enthusiasm. I gave it one star because it makes a much needed bookend on my shelf.”

B) “DULL AND BORING AND INCONCLUSIVE”

“This book seemed to continually go on. It never really came to any important lesson or moral in the entire book. The book was extremely vague, nothing really had a reason for happening it just did it was very disappointing after hearing all the praise that had gone into it.”

C) “GODAWFUL BORE”

“Dear lord this book was awful. One of the very few novels that I have been unable to finish, or indeed even get to half-way. It was just TOO BORING! Before throwing it in the charity bin I skimmed through the rest to see if something, anything, happened that I would be interested in. Nope. As for the much-praised language, maybe it was because I was reading the English translation but nothing about it struck me as being at all out of the ordinary. I see from other reviews that this is a high school text in some countries; had I had to read this dull, blowsy tripe for school I would have been tempted to drop out.”

D) “HORRIBLE”

“You will need a scorecard to keep track of the characters in this one. There must be hundreds, if not thousands. None of them were interesting enough to bother with and I quit the book after three hundred pages of being bored out of my mind. Every few pages, I had to try to remember which character was which as there were so many and many of them were indistinguishable from each other. (The author) writes pretty flat prose. It never soars or goes anywhere. He just describes and reports, as boringly as possible. This type of literature is not going to hold an audience anymore. So many people have the opportunity to live interesting lives nowadays why would they stop to read a novel of this length about a bunch of fictional charaters when they could be spending the time actually LIVING their own lives? It was a real drag.”

E) “BLAH”

“I thought I would like this book after reading the reviews, but I tried to start it and it went NOWHERE! Plus, it was really hard to read. And boring. Ugh. I don’t recommend this book.”

26 Responses to “Great Book, Bad Review Quiz!”

I was somehow relieved after reading post. You know why? I recognized that some of those books were part of my struggling years in school. I was forced to read and write my own review. Being a naive student then, my mistake is I’ve never been really honest in my reviews. I usually conceal my negative perceptions. I wish I had read this post before

Great post. Ya know – I am not really a “classics person” for that exact reason, I find them all very slow and boring! I know that they are all great books and I should like them – but I don’t. There have been very few classics that I liked. I can probably count them on one hand. One person I do really like is – Virginia Woolf, I think its her style and the whole “woman power” thing.

There are some books that have gotten poor reviews and I have really loved the book! And the other way around.
I am reading a book now that got great reviews (almost all 5 stars) but I am finding it so slow and uninteresting. And it is one that I have to review. But I do have to be honest in my review too! What I say is – while it may not be my type of book – it may be yours!

Wonderful post, and so true! Some books that are supposed to be great I find completely not to my liking. But thank goodness we all like different things. My only gripe is the trigger that motivates people to publicly write a bad review, when it’s clearly a matter of taste. Can’t they just put the book down and move on to something else without leaving a trail of slime behind them? The world just HAS to know how much they were bored by a book?

We can never please everyone so I’m glad you’re looking at this all with a good attitude. You are wonderful, you are published, and you are the only one that can make you feel less than you are. Hugs sweetness and wishing you continued success! :O)

900 pages of rubbish, they clearly read. hahahaha. 900 pages kept as a bookend they love enough to keep! 900 pages they hated enough to write a review about. I have to be honest here, if I don’t like a book, I won’t tie my name to it in a review, good or bad. If it was that bad at what point would you not stop and never go back? Toss in the recycling? 900 bad pages are a lot to read. Just saying.

I had an editor once who said, “Bad reviews mean they will come back and read you again just to see what else you did to piss them off. Bad reviews mean they read you and are talking about you and! debating your writing. Bad reviews mean you are selling me papers– no one talks about the rainbows. So chin up girl, bad reviews mean you’re finally confident enough as a writer to make waves.” Yes!?

We all get the occasional bad reviews from time to time. And yes, it sucks, but, no, it doesn’t matter. I also found out that it is not good to have unanimously good comments. It doesn’t look real. I think that we should thank people who give bad reviews, they are making us look more interesting.

Phew! Missed a sentence when I read this blog. For a while I thought these were reviews about your book. My eyes couldn’t stop popping out of my head. You see, I love your book I know no one can please everyone but as I thought that these were about Before Ever After, I was ready to write these off as blasphemy. You are writing another book, right? Please say yes! *puppy dog face*